3 ms·

I hate you Microsoft

141 points by henriquenunez 16d ago

lousken 16d ago
Why do people still use microslop in the age of ai?
- tombert 16d ago
  I've said this before, but Microsoft has a bizarre reality distortion field where people will simply forget the bullshit they put up with with their software. People will (correctly) complain about jankiness and bullshit associated with Linux, but simply forget that Windows Update bricked their computer because their developers do not understand secure boot, or how they broke copypaste, or how they broke Notepad, or how the Windows "Repair Tools" have never worked for anyone in history. Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, but I do feel like I still put up with less garbage from it than people do with Windows. Also, even if I do get some garbage from it, you know what's cool? Snapshots actually work, something you cannot say about Windows System Restore. Bit of a shameless bit of self-promotion, but.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401
commandersaki 16d ago
[flagged]
- armadyl 16d ago
  Alright this post can go ahead and be marked as completed its all that needs to be said
TutleCpt 16d ago
I also hate Microsoft.
- hosel 16d ago
  What they did to windows is criminal. I honestly cannot believe the state of windows 11. I will never work a job again where I have to use windows.
  - jbubimon 16d ago
    Criminal behaviour is in Windows’ very DNA. Microsoft openly taking advantage of its customers and treating them like cattle is perfectly on brand for them. Always has been. Always will be. Windows and Office only gained traction via nefarious acts on Microsoft’s part and now we live in a world where Microsoft is relevant. Criminal all the way down.
  - tombert 16d ago
    It's a soft line in the sand for me as well. If a job pays really really well, then sure I will run Windows, but short of that I'm going to opt for Mac, or I'm going to try and figure out a way to replace the Windows with a Linux.
  - fooker 15d ago
    The version of windows you get for software development at a company that needs windows for software development is pretty good, no sign of any adware or bloatware, no phoning home, no sus telemetry or updates forced by microsoft.
vondur 16d ago
It looks like your license only allows for the web version, so your university probably isn't spending that much for it. You'd get the same message on Windows too.
- nrub 16d ago
  I think this overlooks the full picture. It's not about the this one pin prick relating to their license. It's that working with Microsoft in any capacity is filled with paper cuts like this, annoyances, bad design, and overt errors. Every single day. They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
  - internet101010 16d ago
    Windows 11 has been out for like 6 years and they still haven't fixed a major File Explorer bug: after a few minutes of File Explorer being open the menu bar for the old File Explorer pops up underneath the new thing that replace the menu bar; none of the buttons on this weird artifact from the past work. It's just there. Re-open File Explorer and it goes away, until a few minutes later and it re-appears. Not as noticeable on light mode but a constant distracting reminder about how much Microslop sucks on dark mode.
    - WalterBright 16d ago
      Should have stayed with Windows 7!
  - bunderbunder 16d ago
    Though, that's true of every single Microsoft-sized B2B-focused company I've ever encountered, as well as the one I once worked at. I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything. And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
Handy-Man 16d ago
It seems your plan wouldn't even allow editing on Windows. Your university seems to be just paying for web versions.
jadar 16d ago
First, doesn't Microsoft give away M365 for free to educational institutions? (Perhaps that's only US institutions, though.) Second, isn't this how they bill their accounts — Business Basic doesn't get desktop apps and you need to pay more to use desktop apps? Third, did the OP try to open their document in LibreOffice? I think there's a legitimate criticism of the move from one-time lifetime purchases to the SaaS economy, but Microsoft isn't the only one who deserves criticism for this.
- saulpw 16d ago
  Perhaps Microsoft is the biggest one though? (Who could possibly be bigger?)
  - jadar 16d ago
    Perhaps Google would be bigger? They don't even have desktop app offerings and the consumer versions are subsidized with your advertising data. They certainly weren't the first to introduce the pattern. I feel like Adobe was one of the first big providers to move from lifetime licenses to subscriptions.
- BlueTissuePaper 15d ago
  After I finished University I was told I could keep my email for life. I can't recall now the license (Web Office apps, Onedrive, email) but Microsoft decided to pull the plug so the university had to close out the old accounts. I understand Onedrive, but not allowing email to continue?! Microsoft are price gouging. Shortly after Microsoft ended the 10x Free Business Premium for Not For Profit/Charities, I went to a convention and Microsoft had a talk about how to maximise profits from NFP/Charities; "NFP doesn't mean no money" "Microsoft are doing more for charities and NFP to help build blah blah" VERY rich after literally dropping these licenses which most small NFPs would run off exclusively for office staff.
jimbobimbo 16d ago
Alternative headline: my university had bought a (cheaper?) plan which doesn't tick all necessary boxes.
- Grombobulous 16d ago
  This is a good time to point out that Microsoft’s tiers and pricing for Microsoft 365 is completely insane as far as the overwhelming number of different ways to fundamentally buy the exact same software. I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
- rwz 15d ago
  I think the main point is that the existence of this box is a problem, not that someone forgot or deliberately chosen not to tick it.
yndoendo 16d ago
You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services. The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.
- johnsmith1840 16d ago
  I recently was building out on azure and oh boy, the joy of microsoft products. Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
- vinni2 16d ago
  > You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services. I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist. But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
  - WalterBright 16d ago
    How can they force you to not use Thunderbird mail? If I use Thunderbird mail to send an email to an Exchange user, would it be blocked? How about vice versa?
- deleted 15d ago
  [deleted]
- drooopy 15d ago
  You'd have to pay me as well to use any Microsoft product, which is exactly what's been happening at my place of work haha
pelagicAustral 16d ago
Skill issue, this is why I mainline a macbook pro, a windows shitbox laptop and my kubuntu katana mega riced XPS. Yeah, I also walk about with a live cd.
- humungus 16d ago
  based
harmlessblu 16d ago
I've seen this and I think it's actually a bug. I have mac computers at work and occasionally this will crop up and typically signing out and back in resolves the issue.
deleted 16d ago
[deleted]
bjt12345 16d ago
I think one of the more insane things Microsoft have done is their product management of MS Visio. It became so insanely expensive my work started making us apply for 3 month licenses until we gave up and found something else. About 15 years ago my Industry was using MS Visio for every diagram. But they updated the GUI entirely and nobody could be bothered with the new format. Now people use DrawIO and MS Visio is forgotten.
- kown7 16d ago
  I don't know what you're doing and I feel all of your Visio pain, but have you tried typst?
  - jadbox 16d ago
    I do like Typst, but Typst isn't really ideal for diagrams... you could use it that way but I don't think it's ideal. Mermaid or PlantUML are better/cleaner options.
    - 0x1ch 16d ago
      Agreed. My resume and slides are all templated with Typst, but I can't be bothered trying UML languages to make diagrams that'll probably be referenced once or twice a year, if ever.
  - ashton314 15d ago
    I am a deep enjoyer of Typst. I love it and I use it absolutely everywhere that I can. CeTZ is a really good package, but I still reach for a tool like Omnigraffle if I need to make a really complicated diagram.
- briangray 16d ago
  Similar story. We moved to DrawIO desktop. I now also use it as a replacement for whiteboarding and have it open in most meetings.
- lopsotronic 15d ago
miamicholo 16d ago
Outlook is the new Lotus Notes
- flowerlad 16d ago
  Outlook for Windows used to be great in the 90s and early 2000s. Since then all they have done is added new bugs. And the latest version is HTML/JavaScript in a WebView, no longer native Windows.
mrdatawolf 16d ago
An Apple user complaining about this? Oh that is rich! I don't condone or like this kind of thing from MS. We all know though who MS copies... You support the company that perfected it. So pot meet kettle.
- jbubimon 16d ago
  Except Apple’s products tend to be at the very least good. The baseline for Microsoft products, however, is unusable.
legitster 16d ago
This is more about the Office 365 admin configuration settings than about Microsoft's products themselves. "Why do people still buy Microsoft?" Because admins can make weird configuration settings.
Scharkenberg 16d ago
Henrique should take it up to his university. When I was a student, mine used to provide me with an account that could use desktop apps on Windows and Mac. Educational institutions get very cheap license bundles compared to enterprises btw. (Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)
- janalsncm 16d ago
  The point is that OS specific licenses shouldn’t exist. Especially when Microsoft makes Word and Windows.
  - Scharkenberg 14d ago
    In this context they don't. There is no license where one can use PowerPoint on Windows, but not on macOS. It would not work on Windows either, because the problem is that his account is only entitled to the web version of the Office apps. The exact wording of the message he got is platform-specific and it doesn't even mention Windows at all.
- stuartd 16d ago
  > Please stop using windows. Please stop using proprietary document formats.
- henriquenunez 15d ago
  As much as I would like, I do not see a future where 100% of software is open source, and I see some benefits on proprietary software (well, before the age of slop and the low entry barrier for reversing things). However, I do think that the information itself (videos, documents) should be in open formats with open specifications, that allow new / other programs to open them.
adamredwoods 16d ago
Is this loosely in regards to the US Cloud Act? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AUpASjLV0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AUpASjLV0E Don't forget: https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/
jbeyer 16d ago
I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 for Mac some years ago. In the last few months, a key certificate expired, and completely bricked the software. MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license. This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
- gnabgib 15d ago
  That's a competing OS issue, not a perpetual Office issue (2013 is still running fine for me, but best not to open untrusted docx)
- themadturk 15d ago
  I did this as well a few years ago, fortunately for a relatively small sum of money. I don't need MS products all that much, usually just Word. So I'm very happy with LibreOffice.
- rstuart4133 15d ago
  > I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 My, memories are short. In 2008 Microsoft "Play for Sure" became play no more. Exactly the same stunt, 11 years before you bought that perpetual licence. Why anybody trusted the company after Play For Sure was a mystery to me. And that was just the beginning. Then came Sony being ripped a new one, Azure being taken down by expired certs - twice in 6 months, critical certs signed with MD5 until it's so weak they were exploited, more recently China running rampant in hosted exchange scraping state secrets, GitHub with record down time, and Windows has become a dog slow ad platform. And yet today Microsoft makes the most revenue than any other software firm. I dunno how they do it. After decades of treating their customers like shit, business has never been so good. They must have one mother of a sales team.
  - ghusto 15d ago
    I heard the novel term "Golf Driven Development" the other day. Essentially it's where software/services aren't sold because people wanted or asked for them, they're sold because one CEO played golf with another CEO (with the express purpose of making this happen). Salesforce, Microsoft, Atlassian, and co. are obviously sold on their merits.
throwaway13337 16d ago
This is cloud-era software philosophy. The device isn't yours. The software isn't yours. You are not a sovereign in your private space. It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination. The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to. We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains. Well, Baby steps I guess?
- M95D 15d ago
  Baby steps, but backwards. The option to disable secure boot will be gone any moment now, by automatic updates "for security", of course. It will probably begin with business laptops, then all laptops, then all x86.
NathanielBaking 16d ago
Might I suggest you familiarize yourself with myriad open source options. Let me guess, you have an iPhone too.
- epihelix 16d ago
  Unfortunately, universities have entrenched with Word documents that cannot format correctly on any FOSS solution, or even on the web version of M365 Word. I have tried, so many times, to request form compatibility at least with the web app. Not going to happen. I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
  - tombert 15d ago
    At the risk of getting in trouble for frequent self promotion, I sicked Claude for a few hours, and Office 365 works with Wine on Linux: https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake It seems to work fine for me, with a legit Office 365 account. I can't promise it will fix your problems but it's the "real", full-fat Windows version of Office, so it might be a starting point if you want to avoid virtualization.
0x20cowboy 16d ago
Less angry than this, but I’ve started needing to use windows for a project, and it’s hilarious how terrible everything is. From constant notifications about everything - everything everywhere all the time - to horrifically overly complicated UI where the one setting you need is in 10 menus and 45 tree nodes to onenote and copilot constantly reseting themselves and asking me to log in to something I dont care about. I truely wonder how anyone can use this all day and get anything done. The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application. What have we become?
- toomuchtodo 16d ago
  This is the end result of capitalism and the demand for endless growth. Line must go up. If you want to avoid the extraction machine, use source software at parity or create new open source solutions with LLMs. Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.
nalekberov 16d ago
I don't understand why the author thinks that Apple is any better than Microsoft. Heck, you can use cracked Windows on any compatible machine. Can you do that with MacOS? Apple is selfish, it wants to control the entire chain.
- M95D 15d ago
  It might not be better, but you can't use that argument.
  - nalekberov 15d ago
    I can and as a matter of fact, I did.
hmokiguess 16d ago
We* We Hate You Microsoft.
bede 16d ago
I've been using university-licensed Office for a decade across several fresh MacOS Installs. Only in the last year have I started frequently receiving "sign-in to verify license" nags not unlike the OP's. These also cripple editing functionality until you sign in, forcing you to do the 2FA dance every time. The same rot afflicts mobile apps lately. It's such bad taste to perform license checks this aggressively. Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.
- henriquenunez 15d ago
  It's impossible to use teams on a mac, and on firefox. It makes me open a chromium-based browswer or it just doesnt load.
rawgabbit 16d ago
Oddly enough. I found ChatGPT to be good at making slides. I prompt it with the text I want and some "stage direction" about the aesthetics and it makes good slides. It also makes good PDF documents as well; I feed it my markdown and tell it to make a publish quality PDF and it does a good job. In short, I am defaulting to Obsidian/markdown and use ChatGPT when I need to create other formats.
detay 16d ago
Microsoft is a parasite, a tick that lives off of consumer blood. They fucked up hard with internet, mobile, cloud, gaming, hardware and now with AI. No good can come from this company, ever.
throwaway3921 15d ago
A change in management at my work as decreed that we are all in on M365 and Azure. So will be migrating from Google Workspace, AWS EC2 & Aurora, and Cloudflare. Man it looks painful. It will be interesting to see how I do with my Linux desktop...
sam345 15d ago
This is the educational free license. It doesn't allow desktop apps. Only the browser version. It's like Google Workspace apps. It's fine for most people. It's like complaining you have to use Google sheets instead of Excel desktop. If you like Google stick with those apps but it's no different than what Microsoft is giving you in your educational license. If you want the desktop app, tell your admin and they might spring a few dollars a month for a license. Microsoft is actually an excellent value for educational licenses. For a few dollars a month, you get a ton of desktop apps and a lot of web-based apps. And for free, you still get a lot.
VCFundedGenYer 15d ago
The author has many, many free alternatives. LibreOffice. OnlyOffice. Collabora Office. Keynote. While it is scummy that MS did this, the author needs to grow a pair and look up the millions of ways to open a .pptx.
- henriquenunez 15d ago
  I also use open source office programs. Honestly if it were for me I would write my slides in latex. Note that I did not say create a presentation. I said open a presentation. The document in particular has a load of animations, videos, and "rich" powerpoint resources that have been carefully and purposefully designed to be difficult to interop with other software. Remember? "One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company." https://web.archive.org/web/20110930232927/http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110930232927/http://antitrust....
flaep 15d ago
here is the Edu-Licensing overview: https://aka.ms/EDU-Plan-Comparison https://aka.ms/EDU-Plan-Comparison My guess would be, that your university run out of A3 licenses. You got an basic A1. Every education account gets at least A1. If you just created your Microsoft account, you need to wait till a license is assigned. This is automatic but not fast. Office is not free for students. For every teacher an institution gets an ammount of student licenses. If there are a lot more students then teacher then not everyone gets a license. Bottom line, do not use microsoft products at all. With new rules in germany (europe?), public sector is supposed to use open document standards anyway.

141 points by henriquenunez 16d ago

lousken 16d ago

Why do people still use microslop in the age of ai?

tombert 16d ago
I've said this before, but Microsoft has a bizarre reality distortion field where people will simply forget the bullshit they put up with with their software. People will (correctly) complain about jankiness and bullshit associated with Linux, but simply forget that Windows Update bricked their computer because their developers do not understand secure boot, or how they broke copypaste, or how they broke Notepad, or how the Windows "Repair Tools" have never worked for anyone in history. Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, but I do feel like I still put up with less garbage from it than people do with Windows. Also, even if I do get some garbage from it, you know what's cool? Snapshots actually work, something you cannot say about Windows System Restore. Bit of a shameless bit of self-promotion, but.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401

commandersaki 16d ago

[flagged]

armadyl 16d ago
Alright this post can go ahead and be marked as completed its all that needs to be said

TutleCpt 16d ago

I also hate Microsoft.

hosel 16d ago
What they did to windows is criminal. I honestly cannot believe the state of windows 11. I will never work a job again where I have to use windows.
- jbubimon 16d ago
  Criminal behaviour is in Windows’ very DNA. Microsoft openly taking advantage of its customers and treating them like cattle is perfectly on brand for them. Always has been. Always will be. Windows and Office only gained traction via nefarious acts on Microsoft’s part and now we live in a world where Microsoft is relevant. Criminal all the way down.
- tombert 16d ago
  It's a soft line in the sand for me as well. If a job pays really really well, then sure I will run Windows, but short of that I'm going to opt for Mac, or I'm going to try and figure out a way to replace the Windows with a Linux.
- fooker 15d ago
  The version of windows you get for software development at a company that needs windows for software development is pretty good, no sign of any adware or bloatware, no phoning home, no sus telemetry or updates forced by microsoft.

vondur 16d ago

It looks like your license only allows for the web version, so your university probably isn't spending that much for it. You'd get the same message on Windows too.

nrub 16d ago
I think this overlooks the full picture. It's not about the this one pin prick relating to their license. It's that working with Microsoft in any capacity is filled with paper cuts like this, annoyances, bad design, and overt errors. Every single day. They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
- internet101010 16d ago
  Windows 11 has been out for like 6 years and they still haven't fixed a major File Explorer bug: after a few minutes of File Explorer being open the menu bar for the old File Explorer pops up underneath the new thing that replace the menu bar; none of the buttons on this weird artifact from the past work. It's just there. Re-open File Explorer and it goes away, until a few minutes later and it re-appears. Not as noticeable on light mode but a constant distracting reminder about how much Microslop sucks on dark mode.
  - WalterBright 16d ago
    Should have stayed with Windows 7!
- bunderbunder 16d ago
  Though, that's true of every single Microsoft-sized B2B-focused company I've ever encountered, as well as the one I once worked at. I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything. And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

Handy-Man 16d ago

It seems your plan wouldn't even allow editing on Windows. Your university seems to be just paying for web versions.

jadar 16d ago

First, doesn't Microsoft give away M365 for free to educational institutions? (Perhaps that's only US institutions, though.) Second, isn't this how they bill their accounts — Business Basic doesn't get desktop apps and you need to pay more to use desktop apps? Third, did the OP try to open their document in LibreOffice? I think there's a legitimate criticism of the move from one-time lifetime purchases to the SaaS economy, but Microsoft isn't the only one who deserves criticism for this.

saulpw 16d ago
Perhaps Microsoft is the biggest one though? (Who could possibly be bigger?)
- jadar 16d ago
  Perhaps Google would be bigger? They don't even have desktop app offerings and the consumer versions are subsidized with your advertising data. They certainly weren't the first to introduce the pattern. I feel like Adobe was one of the first big providers to move from lifetime licenses to subscriptions.
BlueTissuePaper 15d ago
After I finished University I was told I could keep my email for life. I can't recall now the license (Web Office apps, Onedrive, email) but Microsoft decided to pull the plug so the university had to close out the old accounts. I understand Onedrive, but not allowing email to continue?! Microsoft are price gouging. Shortly after Microsoft ended the 10x Free Business Premium for Not For Profit/Charities, I went to a convention and Microsoft had a talk about how to maximise profits from NFP/Charities; "NFP doesn't mean no money" "Microsoft are doing more for charities and NFP to help build blah blah" VERY rich after literally dropping these licenses which most small NFPs would run off exclusively for office staff.

jimbobimbo 16d ago

Alternative headline: my university had bought a (cheaper?) plan which doesn't tick all necessary boxes.

Grombobulous 16d ago
This is a good time to point out that Microsoft’s tiers and pricing for Microsoft 365 is completely insane as far as the overwhelming number of different ways to fundamentally buy the exact same software. I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
rwz 15d ago
I think the main point is that the existence of this box is a problem, not that someone forgot or deliberately chosen not to tick it.

yndoendo 16d ago

You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services. The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.

johnsmith1840 16d ago
I recently was building out on azure and oh boy, the joy of microsoft products. Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
vinni2 16d ago
> You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services. I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist. But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
- WalterBright 16d ago
  How can they force you to not use Thunderbird mail? If I use Thunderbird mail to send an email to an Exchange user, would it be blocked? How about vice versa?
deleted 15d ago
[deleted]
drooopy 15d ago
You'd have to pay me as well to use any Microsoft product, which is exactly what's been happening at my place of work haha

pelagicAustral 16d ago

Skill issue, this is why I mainline a macbook pro, a windows shitbox laptop and my kubuntu katana mega riced XPS. Yeah, I also walk about with a live cd.

humungus 16d ago
based

harmlessblu 16d ago

I've seen this and I think it's actually a bug. I have mac computers at work and occasionally this will crop up and typically signing out and back in resolves the issue.

deleted 16d ago

[deleted]

bjt12345 16d ago

I think one of the more insane things Microsoft have done is their product management of MS Visio. It became so insanely expensive my work started making us apply for 3 month licenses until we gave up and found something else. About 15 years ago my Industry was using MS Visio for every diagram. But they updated the GUI entirely and nobody could be bothered with the new format. Now people use DrawIO and MS Visio is forgotten.

kown7 16d ago
I don't know what you're doing and I feel all of your Visio pain, but have you tried typst?
- jadbox 16d ago
  I do like Typst, but Typst isn't really ideal for diagrams... you could use it that way but I don't think it's ideal. Mermaid or PlantUML are better/cleaner options.
  - 0x1ch 16d ago
    Agreed. My resume and slides are all templated with Typst, but I can't be bothered trying UML languages to make diagrams that'll probably be referenced once or twice a year, if ever.
- ashton314 15d ago
  I am a deep enjoyer of Typst. I love it and I use it absolutely everywhere that I can. CeTZ is a really good package, but I still reach for a tool like Omnigraffle if I need to make a really complicated diagram.
briangray 16d ago
Similar story. We moved to DrawIO desktop. I now also use it as a replacement for whiteboarding and have it open in most meetings.
lopsotronic 15d ago

miamicholo 16d ago

Outlook is the new Lotus Notes

flowerlad 16d ago
Outlook for Windows used to be great in the 90s and early 2000s. Since then all they have done is added new bugs. And the latest version is HTML/JavaScript in a WebView, no longer native Windows.

mrdatawolf 16d ago

An Apple user complaining about this? Oh that is rich! I don't condone or like this kind of thing from MS. We all know though who MS copies... You support the company that perfected it. So pot meet kettle.

jbubimon 16d ago
Except Apple’s products tend to be at the very least good. The baseline for Microsoft products, however, is unusable.

legitster 16d ago

This is more about the Office 365 admin configuration settings than about Microsoft's products themselves. "Why do people still buy Microsoft?" Because admins can make weird configuration settings.

Scharkenberg 16d ago

Henrique should take it up to his university. When I was a student, mine used to provide me with an account that could use desktop apps on Windows and Mac. Educational institutions get very cheap license bundles compared to enterprises btw. (Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)

janalsncm 16d ago
The point is that OS specific licenses shouldn’t exist. Especially when Microsoft makes Word and Windows.
- Scharkenberg 14d ago
  In this context they don't. There is no license where one can use PowerPoint on Windows, but not on macOS. It would not work on Windows either, because the problem is that his account is only entitled to the web version of the Office apps. The exact wording of the message he got is platform-specific and it doesn't even mention Windows at all.
stuartd 16d ago
> Please stop using windows. Please stop using proprietary document formats.
henriquenunez 15d ago
As much as I would like, I do not see a future where 100% of software is open source, and I see some benefits on proprietary software (well, before the age of slop and the low entry barrier for reversing things). However, I do think that the information itself (videos, documents) should be in open formats with open specifications, that allow new / other programs to open them.

adamredwoods 16d ago

Is this loosely in regards to the US Cloud Act? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AUpASjLV0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AUpASjLV0E Don't forget: https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/

jbeyer 16d ago

I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 for Mac some years ago. In the last few months, a key certificate expired, and completely bricked the software. MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license. This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.

gnabgib 15d ago
That's a competing OS issue, not a perpetual Office issue (2013 is still running fine for me, but best not to open untrusted docx)
themadturk 15d ago
I did this as well a few years ago, fortunately for a relatively small sum of money. I don't need MS products all that much, usually just Word. So I'm very happy with LibreOffice.
rstuart4133 15d ago
> I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 My, memories are short. In 2008 Microsoft "Play for Sure" became play no more. Exactly the same stunt, 11 years before you bought that perpetual licence. Why anybody trusted the company after Play For Sure was a mystery to me. And that was just the beginning. Then came Sony being ripped a new one, Azure being taken down by expired certs - twice in 6 months, critical certs signed with MD5 until it's so weak they were exploited, more recently China running rampant in hosted exchange scraping state secrets, GitHub with record down time, and Windows has become a dog slow ad platform. And yet today Microsoft makes the most revenue than any other software firm. I dunno how they do it. After decades of treating their customers like shit, business has never been so good. They must have one mother of a sales team.
- ghusto 15d ago
  I heard the novel term "Golf Driven Development" the other day. Essentially it's where software/services aren't sold because people wanted or asked for them, they're sold because one CEO played golf with another CEO (with the express purpose of making this happen). Salesforce, Microsoft, Atlassian, and co. are obviously sold on their merits.

throwaway13337 16d ago

This is cloud-era software philosophy. The device isn't yours. The software isn't yours. You are not a sovereign in your private space. It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination. The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to. We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains. Well, Baby steps I guess?

M95D 15d ago
Baby steps, but backwards. The option to disable secure boot will be gone any moment now, by automatic updates "for security", of course. It will probably begin with business laptops, then all laptops, then all x86.

NathanielBaking 16d ago

Might I suggest you familiarize yourself with myriad open source options. Let me guess, you have an iPhone too.

epihelix 16d ago
Unfortunately, universities have entrenched with Word documents that cannot format correctly on any FOSS solution, or even on the web version of M365 Word. I have tried, so many times, to request form compatibility at least with the web app. Not going to happen. I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
- tombert 15d ago
  At the risk of getting in trouble for frequent self promotion, I sicked Claude for a few hours, and Office 365 works with Wine on Linux: https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake It seems to work fine for me, with a legit Office 365 account. I can't promise it will fix your problems but it's the "real", full-fat Windows version of Office, so it might be a starting point if you want to avoid virtualization.

0x20cowboy 16d ago

Less angry than this, but I’ve started needing to use windows for a project, and it’s hilarious how terrible everything is. From constant notifications about everything - everything everywhere all the time - to horrifically overly complicated UI where the one setting you need is in 10 menus and 45 tree nodes to onenote and copilot constantly reseting themselves and asking me to log in to something I dont care about. I truely wonder how anyone can use this all day and get anything done. The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application. What have we become?

toomuchtodo 16d ago
This is the end result of capitalism and the demand for endless growth. Line must go up. If you want to avoid the extraction machine, use source software at parity or create new open source solutions with LLMs. Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.

nalekberov 16d ago

I don't understand why the author thinks that Apple is any better than Microsoft. Heck, you can use cracked Windows on any compatible machine. Can you do that with MacOS? Apple is selfish, it wants to control the entire chain.

M95D 15d ago
It might not be better, but you can't use that argument.
- nalekberov 15d ago
  I can and as a matter of fact, I did.

hmokiguess 16d ago

We* We Hate You Microsoft.

bede 16d ago

I've been using university-licensed Office for a decade across several fresh MacOS Installs. Only in the last year have I started frequently receiving "sign-in to verify license" nags not unlike the OP's. These also cripple editing functionality until you sign in, forcing you to do the 2FA dance every time. The same rot afflicts mobile apps lately. It's such bad taste to perform license checks this aggressively. Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.

henriquenunez 15d ago
It's impossible to use teams on a mac, and on firefox. It makes me open a chromium-based browswer or it just doesnt load.

rawgabbit 16d ago

Oddly enough. I found ChatGPT to be good at making slides. I prompt it with the text I want and some "stage direction" about the aesthetics and it makes good slides. It also makes good PDF documents as well; I feed it my markdown and tell it to make a publish quality PDF and it does a good job. In short, I am defaulting to Obsidian/markdown and use ChatGPT when I need to create other formats.

detay 16d ago

Microsoft is a parasite, a tick that lives off of consumer blood. They fucked up hard with internet, mobile, cloud, gaming, hardware and now with AI. No good can come from this company, ever.

throwaway3921 15d ago

A change in management at my work as decreed that we are all in on M365 and Azure. So will be migrating from Google Workspace, AWS EC2 & Aurora, and Cloudflare. Man it looks painful. It will be interesting to see how I do with my Linux desktop...

sam345 15d ago

This is the educational free license. It doesn't allow desktop apps. Only the browser version. It's like Google Workspace apps. It's fine for most people. It's like complaining you have to use Google sheets instead of Excel desktop. If you like Google stick with those apps but it's no different than what Microsoft is giving you in your educational license. If you want the desktop app, tell your admin and they might spring a few dollars a month for a license. Microsoft is actually an excellent value for educational licenses. For a few dollars a month, you get a ton of desktop apps and a lot of web-based apps. And for free, you still get a lot.

VCFundedGenYer 15d ago

The author has many, many free alternatives. LibreOffice. OnlyOffice. Collabora Office. Keynote. While it is scummy that MS did this, the author needs to grow a pair and look up the millions of ways to open a .pptx.

henriquenunez 15d ago
I also use open source office programs. Honestly if it were for me I would write my slides in latex. Note that I did not say create a presentation. I said open a presentation. The document in particular has a load of animations, videos, and "rich" powerpoint resources that have been carefully and purposefully designed to be difficult to interop with other software. Remember? "One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company." https://web.archive.org/web/20110930232927/http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110930232927/http://antitrust....

flaep 15d ago

here is the Edu-Licensing overview: https://aka.ms/EDU-Plan-Comparison https://aka.ms/EDU-Plan-Comparison My guess would be, that your university run out of A3 licenses. You got an basic A1. Every education account gets at least A1. If you just created your Microsoft account, you need to wait till a license is assigned. This is automatic but not fast. Office is not free for students. For every teacher an institution gets an ammount of student licenses. If there are a lot more students then teacher then not everyone gets a license. Bottom line, do not use microsoft products at all. With new rules in germany (europe?), public sector is supposed to use open document standards anyway.